Smithfield Foods owner changes name

SMITHFIELD — Smithfield Foods' parent company will now be known as WH Group Limited, according to an announcement from the company formerly known as Shuanghui International.

The Chinese company purchased Smithfield Foods in September, completing the largest ever takeover of an America company by a Chinese firm.

"The new name ... serves to better differentiate the company as a corporate brand from its numerous product brands," the announcement said.

The letters "W" and "H" correspond to the Chinese characters "Wan" and "Zhou," the company said, which "connote eternity and continents, respectively."

A new WH Group logo "depicts four streams representing the Earth's four major oceans, separating the space into five parts to represent the world's continents," it said.

Chris Pullig, an expert in marketing with Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business, said this is a smart move for a company with global ambitions.

Every company's brand is made up of all the associations you may attach to it, Pullig said. Smithfield's reputation as a family-owned, Virginia company that makes top-quality pig products is a boon in trying to market ham or pork, for example.

The corporate association between Smithfield and a new parent company with a Chinese name was potentially damaging because of perceptions, fair or not, with Chinese companies, Pullig said.

"With Chinese organizational associations, maybe the product becomes cheaper, maybe they don't have that expertise, maybe the heritage aspect gets lost," Pullig said. "WH Group is a much more western name, it has probably a fairly neutral set of associations, because you know nothing about the company unless you look into it and see they used to be Shuanghui."

He also noted that the change to a western-sounding company with a name and logo using worldwide symbolism enables them to shake off regional associations and be perceived as a global company.

And it's not just Chinese companies looking to go global that alter their identities in this way – American companies marketing in China often rebrand products with positively associated Chinese characters.

"It's a difficult task in many ways for us to navigate branding between different cultures," he said, pointing to things like Lay's or Snickers, which use phonetically similar names or characters with positive connotations the same way WH Group has used the characters Wan and Zhou.

"It's kind of the reverse here. They are looking at reaching to the West, so they are looking at changing some of the brand elements" to be more familiar to westerners, Pullig said.

Murphy can be reached by phone at 757-247-4760. Daily Press staff writer Michael Welles Shapiro contributed to this report.